Published 4:00 am, Sunday, April 11, 1999

The "Indelible Images" series was such a good idea two years ago it's become a tradition at the San Francisco International Film Festival. The concept is hard to resist: Bay Area filmmakers get to pick a favorite from all the pictures that have played at the festival since its inception in 1957.

Three good things result: the festival gets to celebrate its past, filmmakers have the alone-in-the-candy-store pleasure of choosing a movie and the public gets to see some good films.

Not just good films -- loved films.

It's an experience that viewers can't have often enough: We walk out of a film stunned, uplifted, excited, transformed -- and we can't wait to see it again.

Peter Coyote had that experience with Akira Kurosawa's "Dersu Uzala" (1975), which he will be introducing at the festival. "I saw it when it came out and it bowled me over," he said in a phone conversation. "I saw it as contrasting all of Western civilization with its antecedents and showing how we suffered by comparison."

The film, which won the best foreign-language film Oscar in 1976, contrasts the life and ways of a military surveyor and Dersu Uzala, a simple woodsman who serves as his guide through the Siberian countryside. Uzala is a man living in perfect harmony with nature.

Coyote says he has had such a powerful movie experience two other times, both with John Cassavetes films. "Once was when I saw 'A Woman Under the Influence' and the other was when I saw 'Opening Night.' These are such great movies that you draw the line between them and other movies. And I'm not overly critical. I like every kind of genre. But some movies are so deep, so profound, they're on a another level.

"It's understandable how rare great movies are when you realize how movies are made. In Hollywood, every a-- with an MBA who has insinuated himself into the system has the right to give notes and countermand artistic decisions. "My guess is that 'Dersu Uzala' happened when Kurosawa had achieved some setback from his producers. I can't prove it, but I believe it. It's such a comparison between the civilized mentality and the honesty and integrity of primitive people."